Case Study: Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County
Background:
Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County (GWDE) is a nonprofit organization that serves all three counties in Delaware and an additional county in neighboring Pennsylvania. GWDE employs nearly 1,100 individuals who serve the local community throughout 19 unique locations – including their retail stores, job resource centers, and workforce development program locations.
Problem:
Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County faces several challenges, including high staff turnover due to low or stagnant wages, a long-term vacancy in the HR Director position, and underdeveloped networking and relationship-building skills, resulting in an over-dependence of smaller grants as a primary source of funding.
Analysis:
GWDE solicited Kovir LLC to develop a comprehensive grant strategy that would maximize the impacts of their time and effort – ultimately introducing their organization to new funding opportunities that aligned with its work and mission. Kovir’s initial phase included a SWOT analysis of GWDE to identify areas they could lean into and spaces in which the organization needed additional development or improvement. A key opportunity emerged through this analysis – splitting funding between the government and private sector, with a preference for bank philanthropy. This approach facilitates more efficient use of organization time and resources when researching or pursuing more extensive funding opportunities.
Kovir LLC initiated an intensive process to streamline and expand upon the organization’s current grant tracking and preparation methods to implement this approach. This process contained – organizing existing grant tracking documents, researching and adding potential funders to these documents, flagging upcoming grant deadlines, data mining for specific program information, and adding collected data to a single document that could be effortlessly accessed and referenced during future applications.
Solution:
Following implementation, Kovir LLC assisted GWDE by thoroughly reviewing and editing the organization’s American Rescue Plan ACT (ARPA) funding application. Additionally, Kovir LLC capitalized on recently improved grant tracking and preparation methods to identify and apply to several potential funding sources well-aligned with the organizational goal of obtaining funds from more extensive local grants.